while German actor Benno Furmann and especially Ben Kingsley engage in a nimbly calculated game of cat and mouse, the film's coup de grace fails to land with the intended punch
here, Daniel Alfredson's aesthetic seems to be aiming for the icy polish of a modern noir, but it leans toward a safe kind of blandness, evincing neither the visceral pleasures of the genre nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances
"Intrigo: Death of an Author" sacrifices its potentially compelling central storyline to an elaborate, meta-style intermingling of supposed fiction and reality that turns out to be far more confusing than intriguing
by Nell Minow [Roger Ebert ]
by David Robb [Slant Magazine ]
